HB 171 
.G3 F4 
Copy 1 



Henry George 

and the 

Economists 



C. B. FILLEBROWN 
77 Summer Street Boston 



COPYRIGHT. 1914-. BY C B. FlLLEBROWN 



HENRY GEORGE 

AND THE 

ECONOMISTS 



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C. B. FILLEBROWN 

77 SUMMER STREET, BOSTON 
19U 



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MAY -5 



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FOREWORD 



TO THE JEW A STUMBLING STONE, 

TO THE GENTILE A ROCK OF 

OFFENCE. 

To many people the greatest immediate 
need of the Single Tax movement is that its 
friends should agree upon clear ideas re- 
garding POSSESSION, OWNERSHIP, 
MONOPOLY, CONFISCATION. As to 
POSSESSION or OWNERSHIP, there is 
already agreement with respect to the thing 
itself; the difference is in regard to name. 
Take nothing from nothing and nothing 
remains, except exposure on all sides to the 
batteries of misrepresentation. As to the 
KERNEL of private property in land — to 
the speculator, it is monopoly, to the occupier 
and user it is ownership. The single tax 
can destroy monopoly; it cannot destroy 
ownership. As to CONFISCATION, when 
Henry George wrote in Progress and 
Poverty: " It is not necessary to con- 
fiscate land, it is only necessary to confiscate 
rent," it may be said in extenuation of his 
flagrant misuse of a term of well established 
meaning, that he descended from his own 
exact and correct custom and adopted by 
way of implied retort the verbal corruption 
of his critics. No man's ipse dixit can 
make taxation confiscation. 

" O wad some power the giftie gie us. 
To see ourseVs as ithers see us 
It wad frae monie a blunder free us, 
And foolish notion." 



HENRY GEORGE AND THE 
ECONOMISTS. 

The mutual attitude of Single Taxers and 
Professors today may not be easy to define, 
but the topic would furnish to those concerned 
what Horace Greeley was wont to call 
** mighty interestin' readin'." Unquestion- 
ably there has been among tlie professional 
economists a tendency not so much to attack 
as perhaps to ignore the Single Taxers. 
Among the various causes for this attitude 
one might be assigned as a certain pronounced 
air of bumptiousness often observable on the 
part of single tax advocates. To this extent, 
without doubt, Single Taxers themselves will 
confess it to be their own fault if the pro- 
fessors are not enamoured of them. Jealous 
for their champion and sharing his sensitive- 
ness to the indifference of the professors, 
Single Taxers have allowed themselves even 
in scattered times and places to generate and 
foster a spirit of animosity sufficient to keep 
the opposing lines well defined. It cannot be 
denied, as reports have shown, that Single 
Taxers frequently have not been over-con- 
siderate of the feelings of the professors. 
Indeed the professors seem to be given over 
by the average Single Taxer as a bad lot. 
On the other hand, who is there that can fur- 
nish any consequential list of professors who 
have attacked with any degree of malignity 
Henry George or his particular theory of 
taxation? 

Militancy is not without distinguished 
apologists. There are people who believe 
that whatever is good in the world should be 
fought for. Peaceful people hold that in a 
fight, the thing fought for is apt to be lost sight 
of, and that the truth conquers in spite of the 
fighting. Some of us are happy in believing 
that militancy is on the wane, — less between 
the nations, less among the churches, less 
among men. Many war phases of a few 
centuries ago are extinct today. In most 
fields of reform, however, there are plenty of 



fighters who can be trusted to live the gospel 
they profess. Indeed, reformers as a class 
esteem it the natiiral course to fight the com- 
mon enemy, often to fight among themselves. 
Single Taxers are no exception. All their 
ofl&cial organs and their advocates, with few 
exceptions, are heralded to '* fight " for the 
cause, and they do it. 

It would be interesting to know if there be 
any considerable ntimber of the many public 
lecturers and speakers for the Single Tax who 
have not at some time spoken slightingly of 
an economist or of his profession? It would 
be interesting to know what Single Tax organs 
have not frequently or infrequently spoken 
disparagingly of the professor of political 
economy? A list of them would be welcome 
to be framed in gold. 

Scholastic discussions, unless carefully 
guarded, are likely to leave a bad taste in the 
mouth. By a hasty or inconsiderate word a 
battle of principles may degenerate at once 
into undignified personalities. For example 
in a notable foreign instance: a certain pro- 
fessor is confronted by the complimentary 
statement that '* the teachings of modem 
economists begin and end nowhere " ; that 
his own teachings *' all through showed a 
decided intellectual incapacity to stand by any 
positive statement"; that his views "illus- 
trate the folly of rushing into a controversy 
without preparation or knowledge " ; and that 
*' he must still be considered a tyro both in 
economics and ethics." Yet this delinquent 
economist *' approved of taxation of land 
values twenty shillings in the poimd " and 
gently remonstrated, *' Is it really worth while 
to spend so much time and space in attacking 
those who want the same thing you want? 
Is not such conduct an example of the per- 
versity and futility into which these men of 
one idea, whom the world blimtly calls 
cranks, so often fall?" 

Not only are flagrant examples of offensive 
insinuation frequent, but there is a super- 
cilious, patronizing style of writing that 



violates good taste, instances of which might 
easily be multiplied. For example, notwith- 
standing the declaration of a professor that, 
if government had started with Single Tax, 
we should have had from the first a practically 
burdenless tax, and that the landowner today 
is paying to a private individual all that he 
would pay to the government beside direct, 
indirect and monopoly taxes, which the Single 
Tax would abolish, yet, because it is thought 
that this professor " falls down " before 
** full Single Tax," he is reminded, after a 
honeyed compliment to *' most of his Univer- 
sity brethren," that he is better posted than 
they, that he " owes it to those who look to 
one in his position for a clear exposition of 
the principles of political economy, to revise 
his argimient." Is this species of veiled 
affront likely to win the leading economists, 
their brethren and their following to our 
reform? 

This backward survey may well begin with 
the notable gathering of economists and 
Single Taxers at the Conference of the Ameri- 
can Social Science Association, Saratoga, 
New York, September 5, 1890. Though not 
without its note of discord, this was a dis- 
tinguished occasion, bringing together a 
company of truly representative men, many 
of them today men of distinction. The 
Conference was devoted entirely to a dis- 
cussion of the Single Tax. Beside Mr. 
George, Messrs. S. B. Clarke, Louis F. Post, 
William Lloyd Garrison, and James R. 
Garret spoke in support of his views. Pro- 
fessors J. B. Clark and E. R. A. Seligman, 
both now of Columbia University, Dr. William 
T. Harris, United States Commissioner of 
Education, President E. Benjamin Andrews 
then of Brown University, Professor Thomas 
Davidson of New York, and Professor E. J. 
James then of the University of Pennsylvania 
took opposite grounds. Mr. George was 
accorded every courtesy of debate by the 
Professors. Regarding the general harmony 
of this occasion, the Secretary testifies that 



in the records of the Conference " no word 
was expunged nor was there any but the 
most cordial feeling toward Mr. George." 
Professor Seligman, while indulging a digni- 
fied resentment at Mr. George's insinuation 
of hypocrisy in the ranks of the professors, 
said in their defense : 

"It is grossly unjust to ascribe 
to the Professors of Political Econ- 
omy a truckling or even an un- 
conscious subservience to the 
powers that be. All history dis- 
proves this. . . No one is more 
desirous of attaining social peace, 
no one has today a deeper sympathy 
with the unhappy lot of the toilers, 
no one is more anxious to seek out 
the true harmony of social interests, 
than the student of political economy. 
If we thought that you had solved 
the problem, we would enthrone 
you high on our council seats, we 
would reverently bend the knee and 
acknowledge in you a master, a 
prophet." 

The next important public utterance of 
Mr. George after the Saratoga conference 
was " The Perplexed Philosopher," wherein 
he arraigned Mr. Spencer in imsparing terms 
for recantation of what he considered funda- 
mental truths. In 1860, Mr. Spencer had 
announced that private property in land was 
wrong. In 1882 he announced that private 
property in land was not wrong. Mr. 
George vigorously assailed the soundness 
and the motive of this change of views. As 
between condemnation and argument in this 
critique the former would seem at first 
glance to preponderate. It was a grievance 
to Mr. George that Mr. Spencer chose to 
ignore the former's book and his work, not 
so much as deigning to read ** Progress and 
Poverty," referring to it as ** A work which 
I closed after a few minutes on finding how 



visionary were its qualities." Also, Mr. 
Spencer believed in materialism and evolu- 
tion; Mr. George did not. Mr. George had 
once met and abruptly parted from Mr. 
Spencer at a private dinner. Indeed, as a 
resultant of mutual mental hostility these 
two gentlemen were so little enamored of 
one another that one could hardly expect 
to find in " The Perplexed Philosopher " 
a sympathetic review of Herbert Spencer. 

The beginning of the controversy between 
George and Spencer may be traced back to 
January, 1883, when the Edinburgh Review, 
in an article entitled '* The Nationalization 
of Land" gave a fair review of "Progress 
and Poverty," in which were coupled the 
names of George and Spencer, both as 
associated with Conmiunism. The latter, 
having little or no knowledge of the former's 
ideas, shrank like a sensitive plant from being 
classed with him, just as hosts of sensible 
people will tell you today that they can affiliate 
with the Single Tax but not with the fads and 
fancies of many Single Taxers. Mr. Spencer 
was also sensitive that the reviewers should 
have neglected his synthetic pretentions until 
their attention was called to his " Social 
Statics," a book thirty years old, and even 
then only in connection with the book of 
another man. Mr. Spencer stated his 
position in a letter to the St. James Gazette 
of London, which called forth replies and 
rejoinders from Huxley, Tyndall, John 
Morley, John Laidley and others. Thus was 
opened up a controversy which from the 
first exhibited in ample proportions the free 
solution of testiness. Finally, in * ' The 
Perplexed Philosopher," Mr. George went 
out of his way, as it were, to make analytical 
disposal of Mr. Spencer's pet synthetic 
labors of a lifetime, his evolution and his 
materialism. The following isolated passages 
show the animus with which he proceeded 
to treat the alleged recantation: 

** I do not regard this as contro- 
9 



versy. It is rather exposure. In 
turning his back on all he has said 
before, Mr. Spencer has not argued, 
and no explanation is possible that 
does not impute motives. . . . In- 
stead of manfully defending the 
truth he had uttered, or straight- 
forwardly recanting it, Mr. Spencer 
sought to shelter himself behind 
ifs and buts, perhapses and it-may- 
bes, and the implication of imtruths. 
. . . Mr. Spencer has had much to 
say of the unfairness of his critics, 
but this reply is not merely unfair; 
it is dishonest, and that in a way that 
makes fiat falsehood seem manly. 
. . , This letter (Mr. Spencer's) is 
merely an attempt to avoid respon- 
sibility and to placate by subterfuge 
the powerful landed interests now 
aroused to anger. . . . Social 
Statics has been disemboweled, 
stuffed, mummified, and then set 
up in the gardens of the Spencerian 
philosophy, where it may be viewed 
with entire complacency by Sir John 
and his Grace. . . . Mr. Spencer 
is thus untruthful in regard to what 
he has taught in Social Statics, he 
is equally untruthful in regard to 
his suppression of that book. . . , 
This treatment of land, or the sur- 
face of the earth, as but one of the 
natural media, is in the highest 
degree unphilosophic, and could be 
adopted onJy for the purpose of con- 
fusion. ... By aid of double- 
barreled ethics and philosophic 
legerdemain, Mr. Spencer evidently 
hopes to keep some reputation for 
consistency and yet uphold private 
property in land. . . . They have 
their choice between intellectual 
incapacity and intellectual dis- 
honesty. . . . He, Mr. Spencer, 
stands ready to sacrifice to his new 

10 



masters not only his moral honesty, 
but, even what the morally depraved 
often cling to, — the pretence of intel- 
lectual honesty. ... In this Chapter, 
" Justice on the Right to Land," he 
(Mr. Spencer) proves himself alike 
a traitor to all that he once held 
and to all that he ^now holds — 
a conscious and deliberate traitor, 
who assumes the place of the philos- 
opher, the office of the judge, only 
to darken truth and to deny justice; 
to sell out the right of the wronged 
and to prostitute his powers in the 
defense of the wronger. ... Is it 
a wonder that intellectually, as 
morally, this chapter is beneath 
contempt? . . . That part of our 
examination which crosses what is 
now his distinctive philosophy shows 
him to be as a philosopher ridiculous, 
as a man contemptible — a fawning 
Vicar of Bray, clothing in pompous 
phraseology and arrogant assump- 
tion logical confusions so absurd as 
to be comical." 

Reviewing the whole controversy today, it 
is not easy to see how the rules of polemics 
justified the severe language of Mr. George 
in which he made his isolated arraignment 
of the great apostle of evolution. Today a 
student of Spencer would be amazed to find 
his revision in 1882 of his views of 1850 made 
the target for such unmeasured censure and 
detraction. And what is this offence of 
Mr. Spencer's that so smells to Heaven? 
Simply this, and nothing more: — In " Social 
Statics " he said that private property in land 
was wrong; in " Justice," forty years later, 
he said that private property in land was not 
wrong. The initial error was in the lack of 
a clear definition of the point at issue. The 
tenet of the wrong of private property in 
land is in itself generally conceded to be 
false and untenable. But George and 

11 



spencer appear to have conceived themselves 
constrained to this belief by the false logic 
of an inverted argument, to wit: 

Since all have a common right to 
the rent of land, the product of their 
collective labor and expenditure, 
therefore all must have a common 
right to the land itself, the gift of 
nature. 

Had the issue been framed in two propo- 
sitions, instead of one, as follows: 

(1). All have an equal right to the 
surface of the earth in its original 
state, because it is a gift of nature. 

(2). All have a common or joint 
right to the artificial rent of land, 
because it is a common creation, 

there might never have arisen the barren and 
profitless discussion that is now being con- 
sidered here, for then the two protagonists 
might conceivably come to an agreement 
that the second of these propositions is 
sound, while the first is crude and false. 

In order to show that Mr. Spencer was 
culpable in this recantation it is needful for 
Mr. George to establish the position that 
Spencer was right in saying in 1850 that ** the 
right of mankind at large to the earth's 
surface is still valid; all deeds, customs and 
laws notwithstanding." This leads to a 
survey and criticism of George's argument 
of 1891 as compared with Spencer's on the 
same point in 1850. 

Henry George wrote in *' Our Land and 
Land Policy" in 1872, as follows: 

"It by no means follows that 
there should be no such thing as 
property in land, but merely that 
there should be no monopolization 
— no standing between the man who 
is willing to work and the field which 
nature offers for his labor. For 

18 



while it is true that the land of a 
country is the free gift of the Creator 
to all the people of that country, to 
the enjoyment of which each has an 
equal natural right, it is also true 
that the recognition of private owner- 
ship of land is necessary to its proper 
use — is, in fact, a condition of 
civilization." 

This statement of George can suffer no 
contradiction. Its truth is grounded in 
reason, science and fact. Conceding indi- 
vidual title to land, he demanded the social- 
ization of rent by taxation. Title to the 
land itself, stable tenure, estate in land, 
ownership of land in severalty, whether its 
value is one dollar or a million dollars, is 
necessary to security of improvements. 
Title to the annual value of land — ground 
rent — is not necessary to the security of 
improvements, which would be equally 
secure whether one-quarter or three-quarters 
of ground rent be taken in taxation. Neither 
in private more than in public ownership of 
land is there any moral or economic wrong. 

There is a persistent though not inexcus- 
able tendency among economists to confuse 
the Single Tax and land nationalization. 
Professor Seligman, in the eighth edition 
of his '' Essays in Taxation," thinks himself 
justified in laying before his 200,000 students 
and emulators in the United States colleges 
and imiversities the following disposal of 
the Single Tax belief: 

'* Land is the creation of God. . . . 
Therefore no one has a right to 
own land. . . . When the change 
advocated is a direct reversal of the 
progress of centuries, and a rever- 
sion to primitive conditions away 
from which all history has travelled, 
the necessity for its absolute proof 
becomes far stronger. The nation- 
alization of land is a demand which 

18 



in order to win general acceptance 
must be based on theories indepen- 
dent of the doctrine of equal right." 

And lo! from whom does such a rapier 
thrust come, but from a gracious professor 
to whom Single Taxers are gratefully in- 
debted for courtesies and hospitalities, who 
has journeyed to promote its discussions and 
who at Saratoga forestalled by a generation 
the Single Taxers themselves in the inestim- 
able service of blocking out a keystone to 
the Smgle Tax arch demonstrating fully a 
proposition previously recognized, but not 
effectively utilized, viz: that the new pur- 
chaser of land, buying as he does free of 
tax, escapes all tax burden. Following is 
his statement made at Saratoga, which has 
yet to be improved upon: 

** It is apparent that the value of 
the land will fall in exact proportion 
to the increase of the tax, until when 
the tax equals the entire rent the 
value of the land will be zero. Dur- 
ing these successive stages, however, 
the new purchasers lose nothing. 
The diminished rent will still yield 
them the same rate of interest as 
before, because of the diminished 
capital value on which the interest 
is computed." 

Professor Ely of the University of Wiscon- 
sin also has been favoring English farmers 
with his views in the following language: 

*' I have no sympathy whatever 
with the Single Taxer in this 
country or any other country. . . . 
No civilization has been built up in 
modem times upon anything else 
than the private ownership of the 
land ; and if you remove that, as the 
Single Taxer proposes to do, it seems 
to me that you would remove the 
solid, substantial foundation of 
modern civilization." 

14 



But what has this to do with the Single 
Tax? It was George's special triumph over 
Spencer, that while himself distinctiy con- 
ceding the legal ownership, individual tenure 
of or estate in the land itself, the very thing 
that forced from Spencer his recantation, 
he corrected and advanced the issue from 
the common right to the use of the earth, 
to the joint right to the enjoyment of rent, 
making clear the distinction that land is 
one thing and the rent of land another and 
different thing — that to take in taxation the 
rent of land it is not necessary to take the 
land itself. The nationalization of land, 
with its incidental enlargement of govern- 
ment functions, formed no part of George's 
program. We appeal to the brotherhood of 
economists at the present stage of the art 
of taxation to forgive us for expostulating 
lustily against such a travesty of the Single 
Tax as that it implies the abolition of the 
institution of private property in land. 

Is it, on the other hand, complimentary to 
the keepers of the Single Tax ark, and the 
variegated expositors of its doctrine that 
after thirty years of discussion and disputa- 
tion nearly every "objector" down to this 
very day is spending the half of his am- 
munition upon deserted earthworks, viz.: 
that the Single Tax means the overthrow 
of the institution of private property in land, 
and that Henry George stood for the nation- 
alization of land. If Henry George had gone 
so far even as to have put himself under the 
dominance of a " steering committee " 
chosen from his enemies the professors, he 
could hardly have fared worse than he has 
done at the hands of his friends. Listen to 
the remarks of a well-known disciple at a 
Henry George Memorial Meeting, the like 
of which subtly do incalculable damage to 
any great cause, because subject to misunder- 
standing : 

" I believe we are in a revolu- 
tionary movement. If I did not 

16 



think so I wouldn't be interested 
in it. We are in a movement which 
aims to let the poor and the disin- 
herited own the earth, and that 
movement is sweeping over the 
entire civilized world." 

If the speaker had said private ownership 
of land itself is right but private appropriation 
of the rent of land is wrong, there would 
have been no poison to his arrow. 

If it be granted, however, as many of his 
professed followers maintain, that Henry 
George did really believe that individual 
permanent title, tenure or estate in land, is 
wrong, then when Spencer in 1882 recanted 
the first six Sections of his original Social 
Statics (1850) the championship of this 
barren doctrine was left practically to Henry 
George alone, as no other economist of 
note can be now recalled to share the honors 
with him. 

After all, have we not haggled long enough 
about what Mr. George said, or meant? 
What is wanted is a science of obtaining the 
normal revenue of a community. The 
immense forward strides in the development 
of economic science in general ought to make 
it possible to determine the truth regarding 
his system even independent of what he 
said forty years ago. If this reconciliation is 
not possible, why not discharge the Single 
Tax at once of this incubus and handicap of 
"common" property in land, wash off the slate, 
and strike out de novo, for a science of natural 
revenue if needs be, sans Spencer, sans 
George, sans theories, sans speculations? 



16 



HENRY GEORGE 
AND THE ECONOMISTS 

THIRTY YEARS OF 
HENRY GEORGE 

NOT A SINGLE TAX 
By Charles T. Root 

A 1914 
SINGLE TAX CATECHISM 



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